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MONBODDOMIND KNOWS THE GATE. MONBODDOMIND IS THE GATE.
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I/WE COULD OPEN AN APERTURE IN THE LIVING UNIVERSE AND DRAIN MATTER IN ORDER TO COMPILE IT HERE IN THOSE FORMS.
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A reaction begins. Our man becomes aware of phenomena, not precisely visual, not precisely auditory, combination of both glimpsed before only in fusion of thought, dance and sound—light trails and undreamt of shapes, [mind] creating pockets of space, living dream islands and atmospheres, fragments of old songs expanding into solid sound sculptures, resonant palaces and towers—
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Songs dancing in the newborn air, treble spirits (brittle angels) rising over regions of subspace density, bright brittle angels and reborn voices, chromosomal swarming of samples, nameless living music—[mind] strolling through aural avenues—
Infraviolet night of time dancing—
Bluegreengold distance atomic weightless sunrise speakers push the air—
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Funkatron One, prepare for broadcast—
“Peoples of the universe, the transmission has been sent. Seize all dictionaries and burn them. Seize all baedekers and burn them now. We will make new words to sing with and new countries of the mind to dance in. Institute Cosmic Consciousness through isotope teleportation and transmolecularization. Funkentelechy: the actualization of funk rather than its potential. Dogon people in Mali, shake your asses; Mongolian people in Ulan Baator, shake your asses. Come together now with peace, love and understanding, and TEAR THE ROOF OFF THE MOTHERSUCKER—
STOP READING/START DANCING
Spirit and Corpus
Yarrow Paisley
A Beginning
It is an anniversary, of sorts. Or a beginning. I will not choose—you choose. As the seconds, in the form of a current, flow past, carrying my bodies along, I have now spent more time in this spirit form than I did in my corpus. None of this choosing of forms, nor their passing through time, was my choice. I am simultaneously more shackled and freer than any man ever was. This state of time passing was your choice, as was this avocation of consciousness even in the midst of my absolute powerlessness to affect any solid thing in the world. I have abided by your decisions for so long now, I cannot imagine being otherwise. There is no possibility that I was ever under the sway of another Power. Even as I spent twenty years building the arsenal of desire and fury that catapulted me into another phase, I was simply checking the blueprint and tracing the pattern back upon myself. You did not realize you were a draftsman, did you? Or a draftswoman. Draftsperson. The terminology is inadequate. The eidolon is not. I will catch it and merge with it any time now. I am the eidolon. My corpus stands not even as an approximation of what I am, even though I am nothing lacking it.
I have been a spirit roaming at will out of this body, following back into their stories the visitors who were a torrent that diminished to a trickle as the years eroded the channels of my network. They were visitors because their bodies could come and go as it pleased their commanders seated in skulls shaped by countless moments and days of exposure to the world. They visited and tasted of my company, as ill-gratifying as it was, my corpus being leaden and disfigured. So what did they taste? My spirit form ventured to lick their quick tongues—for lighter, I was quicker—to discover embedded in their flesh the sensation that creeps in from the world and spreads across the capillaries into the deepness of the human organ that has no bottom since it has no shape. Or if there is a shape, it is not laid into the geometry of existing things, only into the space between those interstices of the structure, the formlessness that holds forms together. I may see into such places, since I am myself a spirit form, wedded yet to my corpus, which lies insensate through the decades, but freed to roam along with whomsoever might carry me.
It is the case that my corpus desired the woman Coraline, which is an absurd name that just now came into my head—I am calling it my head, although you know better than I the range and accuracy of that metaphor, and the limits thereof—but is there any reason she could not bear that name? She is only a corpus, her spirit form slumbering in torpor, just the opposite of me, a slumbering corpus, paired to a spirit form awake and jealous of the world’s movement. I use the word “jealous” to indicate that I covet the expense of energy to jar stillness into motion, to transcribe the narrative of the spirit bound inside the book of all matter into the joyous direction and speed of a projectile. I am incapable. My corpus failed me at a most inopportune moment. You know better than to blame Coraline, but I do not. I shall name her and pursue her through all the words of your story. You think you know better than I, but you know so much less than you think you do.
I should not give the impression that the spirit yet desires her. No, no, no.
No!
It was, was, the corpus. He, not I, but he desired—note the tense—Coraline for that hers was the body into which he imagined he would penetrate. Through the use of “penetration,” sexuality is referenced, yes, but there is the intention, as well, to evoke a divine sense of that word. He aspired to the engulfment of his body into forgetfulness of itself, which would lead to the destruction of everything that restrained the corpus from being formless and brilliant, as I now am—yet he could not know how the corpus would shackle him anyhow. It could be said he achieved the thing he desired, but in no way am I the form that he desired to inhabit. So instead, it shall be said, he desired blindly, and was met with a reward he did not anticipate, and which he cannot refuse. I have spent these years, now equal in number to the preceding years, trapped and free, always to taste their tongues, never mine. And if now I desire the taste of my own flesh, shall I ever be thus rewarded? The only taste left in the world is bitterness. But that is a sweetness, for it is the taste that I am left to contemplate, and if there is a form remaining capable of tasting anything, it is a form that must be grateful for itself. It must ingest the bitterness and love the taste. Even as the bile oozes through the tubes of the corpus, seeking a proud, gooey station in a plastic bag that will be dispensed into a medical waste canister for later disposal in a removed location hidden from the knowledge of all visitors whose income exceeds the measure set forth by authorities to whom they all plead their obeisance even as they gripe about taxes. I know you spit the word, even while you type it, but truly you feel nothing. It is just another form to which you pledge your devotion. If not the complaint, then the praise. If not the praise, then the torpor. If not the torpor, then the ache. If not the ache, then the pleasant hour spent in a wooded glade beneath a sky you half remember from a childhood incident that has faded but left its sensory mark in a playful swipe upon a surface of your brain that turned inward and safe from disturbance until being riffled by the reflection of itself boring ever more deeply inward through an eye that beheld a mystery of blueness and wisp. There is no curlicue in you that can retain a secret under the assault of a beauty more transcendent than the animal, more transdermal than the plant, more translucent than the mineral, more intransigent than category, more interrupted than the Muse of the Solar System, who has not been observed yet even by those equipped to receive the peculiar rays of electromagnetism she casts boldly forth. You laugh, but who are you, typist? The M
use will exercise her thumb in your excellent childlike bum, even while you dream of the Womb’s Conclave. It is true she loses track, her fingers too weak to follow the thread out of her own loom, and often weaves nothing but the breath of the world, but is it not so that breath too is necessary to the continuation of a narrative? Should you fail to take a breath, you would surely wheeze and cough, fall from your chair, dissolve into the pain of a body disjointed from the Muse of the Solar System. And you know nothing of these things, for I am the spirit form and you are only the corpus. It is not contempt I am expressing, nor pity, nor factualness. I am only expressing the memory of taste, the discovery of ecstasy—did you not realize ecstasy emanates from breath? It is a foolish world you inhabit, but I am no wiser than you. I am simply a weightless package you carry on your shoulder, carry with you out the door, carry with you as you walk away from the visitor state and walk toward the state of being a human being who once visited me. I loved you then, and even as I waft alongside and spread myself astride your back and sink myself into your corpus, I continue to love you, for you are taking me on a journey through a world I am forbidden ever again from truly tasting.
I am not eliciting your pity. That is not my purpose!
Damn you!
You are nothing but filigree, anyhow, on a coin that will never be spent. You reside in my pocket, jingling against all the others. You believe in the rhetoric of your ornamentation, but has not a doubt frissoned through you from time to time? Have you not heard a whisper, my whisper, as you checked the mail and sat down with the bills? A word rose like a feather in a draft and settled into stillness on the far curve of your brain, such a word as “Unstable” or “External.” A word that kept within its kerning the secret you had been yearning toward but “Ungrasped,” and oh the pain of being filigree on a coin that will not be spent! A jingle will trigger the waft of the word, a spasm of movement will trigger the current of air that moves the feather, but you are filled with the knowledge that this whisper came not from you, nor from the world whose difference you transcribe into your corpus on a fleeting but permanent basis, but from me. Should I wish to spend the thing for which you are the decoration, it is true, I cannot. But I can imagine the transaction. I can envision your oblivion in the cash drawer. I can consign you to the surface of a thing itself submerged eternally in a pile of similar indistinguishable things. Imagine the filigree of neighboring coins brushing up against you, rubbing you, wearing you down until you are nearly invisible. I say there will come a time when your form cannot be discerned on the surface, and all that remains is an essence detectable only to those who have beheld the original form it is the essence of. Filigree is not eternal. I am no filigree. I am the coin itself. My own filigree lies wasting away on a thin mattress under stiff sheets. It is the thing you visit. It is the thing you leave when you are done visiting.
Coraline. You still arrive. You are one of the remaining few who do. I know you are here when I alight upon your tiny nose that sweeps gently back into a brow that is not so furrowed or disturbed as once it was in the early days of my waylaid corpus. You knew you were a villain then, but the knowledge has faltered and descended to the splanchnes as the years have passed, burping back up now and then to incite a riot on your face, then sinking slowly back into your organs like a penny thrown into a lake. I know these facts not from direct experience, but from the taste of your tongue, the scent of your self’s continuous eruption into the gaseous form. You hardly feel it escaping, do you? That gas from within steaming out of your orifices at a pace that would alarm any self-respecting so-called “sealed” container. Not so sealed, are you? That is what comes with guilt. You being the guilty one are leaking. Those few pure ones remain hermetic. I do not know them; they have not visited. They are so happy! You are leaking. Are you happy? Have you fooled yourself sometimes with the sensation of self-containment? Perhaps you filled your lungs and held your breath for a moment, and experienced the transitory pleasure of the empty thing that is filled up with something else. But the breath exploded outward, and you knew so well that you are empty and always will be, even if sometimes you are able to draw the breath in for the sake of fantasy. Others might be watching. Perhaps they could fall for the trick. Perhaps they could be persuaded, but not all of them. There are always those in the know, too clever to be taken in. But some live in a state of perpetual credulity, an innocence of the smooth mind, the simple geometry of a consciousness unaware of angles and curves.
I am watching. I have already described the trick. I will not fall for anything. I have tasted you, remember? I have been in and out, licking everything, savoring it all, retreating respectfully into my corpus with the memory of the taste, then venturing back into the air to alight upon your nose when you come a-visiting, sweet one. I will not fall for any tricks—my vision is clear, my nose is clean, my ears hear your mind’s whispers, my senses fly through your body and encompass it round, containing you and everything you believe you contain, everything that stays within you and everything that leaks out or jumps from your skin in a haze of molecules, a cloud of dust too fine to be spied by the eye of the body. Whereas, I am something that can infinitely absorb. I am the spirit form, awake and spongy, while my corpus sleeps, insensate, and while your spirit form sleeps, insensate, I create everything you think you see.
That is not true, but I can tell it. How will you distinguish the truth from the infantile self-pleasurings with which I indulge myself on a continuing basis when my gaseousness is sequestered from yours? I am entirely leaked out, after all. But I have flowed into another balloon, swallowed through a narrow pinhole, encased behind an impermeable membrane, and so I am not dispersed. The corpus remains abed, but the balloon floats nearby. Not nearly so hardy or sensual as the corpus. But aware, far more aware than that nearly dead thing, that piece of stuff, that what-is-it with a blanket draped across it. And you speak sometimes of your sorrow. I see clearly the desire within you for me to hear it, for me to know it, for me to become the vessel of your atonement. I can hear, sweet one, I know absolutely, and yet I am no such vessel. I call down the furies on you! You did not know they still have a presence in this world, did you? They shriek through the interstices, and that is the whistling of their clothes you hear in the agonizing instant just before you wake in the morning. History has not obscured them in the least—they still harangue, and they yet disturb your dreams with their screaming of my pleasure. Their mouths are the pipes I play my voice through, which voice is not even raised to a whisper when I without my body attempt to give it, but which becomes a walloping of the tympanums when the instrument is blown.
The corpus invokes me at times to travel along its surfaces and tap out the codes of its memory. I am a spirit of duty, and I am compelled to proceed according to the rules that bind me into being. The trillion drops that have touched the tongue, cold, hot, a spectrum of agitated particles banging against the wet flesh, transmitting into that wetness the frenzy of temperature. A scalded moment, a soothed one, all blended into what sensation is. Sensation is. A fingertip pricked upon an unexpected tack. An eyeball pierced by an errant lash. A lung become the cauldron to contain the inadvertent spillage of a vitamin-enhanced beverage, chilled and orange-flavored. Indeed, the spirit form is called at times to move upon the flesh of the corpus—to resurrect what once was felt directly, now only through memory, but potent. I am impressed into service to ride the waves of what I once called my flesh, to cull the depths for remnants of wreckage that might retain value, to harvest and sort items by size and complexity of shape. Beauty is in the twist. Boredom is in the sharp tip that presses into the fold between a thigh and a groin. A shape spirals into excitement, but the instant is gone as the particles dissipate. The shape welling up from flesh cannot last. It burgeons with ecstasy and flattens to the dismal level between height and depth. Coraline causes a spark to flare across a gap when she enters to visit, and a spirit flies up to meet her. Indeed, I am that one. The corpus acts entirely without will, and
yet I am bound to its will as surely as my own will binds you, Coraline, and however much you plead with yourself to stay away, you will always be visiting. Perhaps you will find your atonement. I say that laughingly.
In flesh, at the pinnacle of my twenty years, I raised my head to blurt out joy, I bent my neck to place my skull at the precise angle, as I glided under, to prevent the “crack,” which surely awaited in absence of evasive maneuvers, and which would have been disappointed had you not called out that name, you know the one. My name. Not my name, sweet one, but the name of the corpus, which even now draws breath so peacefully in a wickedly disfigured shell. The calling of the name brings a sharp response. A twist. A “crack.” The resonating barrier between the twenty years of fleshly sensation and the twenty years in another phase I have called the “spirit form,” which is of course a misnomer, but shall I call it what it truly is, I will die screaming. This too, I say laughingly.
I do not dwell in these moments. They dwell in me. I dwell in you. You dwell above the corpus at times, leaning in, your breath cool by the time its gentle waft has brought it into contact with a clammy swatch of skin beneath the chin. Bumps are raised upon the surface. A ripple flows through. A buzz sounds. There is a brown cloud in the angle of discomfort, but now it has assembled into the face of a doctor, the most familiar one. You have these discussions infrequently, but in your hesitancy—even has the span of years been great—you are revealed afraid. At some moments, even my fury is weakened, exhausted. I am revealed a fraud. How could a spirit form be so dispirited? I wish for a hand to brush aside that bang. How could you? Your hair never was so long. I wish for scissors to rectify the bang. The doctor is so sonorous and calm, you cannot help but be infected by the virus of his quietude. All through you it rages, self-replicating, urgent, propagating through the channels of your corpus until you are limp, grasping for the chair, the doctor aiding you, my spirit form caressing your fingertips, your fingertips clasping at the cushions. This doctor did not exist at the beginning. There have been several of him in the intervening time. Twenty years is a long span. Professionals advance through the stages of their careers. New locations are sought out, new offices, new patients, breezes, palm trees, the silence of the greens, the propeller drone of distant planes, the delicate tinkle of ice in a thick glass cascading tears into a mandala of puddles on a wicker table, a sinking sun that transforms the horizon’s dull haze into an orange, wide shimmer ready to leap out into space as crackling flame at the moment of its choosing.
Dadaoism (An Anthology) Page 11
